


The Play's the Thing

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bastardizing Shakespeare, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-11 04:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7877263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve had heard there were HYDRA minions lurking in the Shakespeare troupe. Infiltrating the play might not have been his brightest idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Play's the Thing

**Author's Note:**

> danahid prompted "curtain fic," and because I had no idea what a curtain fic was at the time, I wrote a fic with curtains. (Once I figured it out, we got "Taking Note," but honestly this one was far more entertaining to write. And I got to recall my adolescent love affair of pairing Mercutio with almost any character in Romeo and Juliet and rereading the play with that doomed love in mind.)

Act I: The Curtain Rises

“This is officially the stupidest idea you’ve ever had,” Bucky muttered, blinking hard when the stage lights went on and caught him trying to readjust his codpiece. “And you’ve had a million dumb ideas, so that’s saying something.”

“Did you have a better plan?” Steve hissed, keeping one hand on his dark wig, afraid it was about to fall off. He desperately wanted to untwist the tights cutting off circulation to his legs, but he refused to give Bucky the satisfaction of seeing him squirm. It was Steve’s own fault, for mocking Bucky’s moue of displeasure at the costumes, declaring that at least _one_ of them knew how to take the stage in tights.

They both remembered the audience at the same time, spinning to look out over the auditorium. Steve couldn’t make out a single face, blinded by the stage lights and the sweat starting to drip down his forehead.

“Um,” he stuttered, and ignored Bucky’s snort. “What do I say?” he whispered, suddenly thankful for his friend’s enhanced hearing.

“‘Can I go forward’,” Bucky prompted, shifting into the shadows at the edge of the stage, “'when my heart is here?'” He didn’t stop smirking, and all Steve could see of his best friend were white teeth and pale blue eyes by the velvet curtain’s edge. If he echoed the lines facing stage left instead of the audience, well, they could still hear him.

“Seriously,” Sam seconded, squatting down in the makeshift balcony, “the worst idea you’ve ever had, Rogers. Are you sure that Hydr-”

Then Benvolio strode onto the stage, and Sam’s mouth clicked shut. That made four of them there, and only one of them knew their lines.

Or two of them, Steve admitted, forgetting to hide in the fake bushes like Bucky had told him, watching his best friend roll his eyes and launch effortlessly into the play. “Romeo,” he drawled, giving Steve a look that could have curdled milk. “ _Madman_. Passion. _Lover_.” Benvolio scowled at them, but then Bucky smiled at Steve and strolled forward – his swagger more pronounced, these days, under the weight of his left arm – and Steve forgot about the hedges entirely. “Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied.”

He continued the soliloquy, circling Steve like a predator and tossing off lewd gestures that made the audience laugh. It took Steve longer than it should have to realize that Bucky was also signing, intermixing Shakespeare with silent military commands. _Wait. Stay down. Armed._ Bucky tilted his head to indicate Benvolio’s ankles, obscured by his boots.

“See!” Steve mouthed, widening his eyes. “I told you they were here!”

Then Benvolio said something about leaving, and Bucky raised his eyebrows and bowed backward off the stage. Which reminded Steve that only one of them had passed English – had written both their papers, and scrawled answers into the air when Sister Margaret demanded them – and it hadn’t been him.

“Your line, Romeo!” Sam growled, fighting with his wig, blond hair tangled in his fingers and over his face.

“Um,” Steve said again. His memory had improved with the serum, and he could recall every second of a young Bucky stretched lazily across Steve’s sickbed, acting all the parts in _Romeo and Juliet_. He could remember the way Bucky’s hair curled onto his forehead, before he’d had the money for brylcreem, the cuff of his shirt outlining the strength of his wrists, the grin he’d shot Steve when he quoted Shakespeare to woo dames. Steve could recall every second of the play; he just couldn’t remember any of the _words_. “Juliet!” he announced, shriller than Romeo was probably meant to sound.

Sam groaned, but stood up and leaned out over the balcony, because Sam Wilson was a good friend. Bucky, on the other hand, was a jerk, leaning against the scenery in dark tights, his arms folded across his chest while he laughed at Steve.

“'But soft’,” he whispered, when Steve waved his hands in his own personal sign language for 'help!’. And Steve could hear Bucky’s voice in the high pitches of their childhood, see the dimple in his chin before either of them had needed to shave, before they’d grown up and fallen so far down. “'It is my lady. Oh!'” Bucky’s smirk softened to something kinder, his eyes still twinkling with laughter. “'It is my love.'”

“'Romeo, Romeo,'” Sam interrupted in an awful falsetto, completely off script, Steve guessed from Bucky’s disgruntled expression. But the Winter Soldier – their Winter Soldier, _Steve’s_ Winter Soldier, the hero Bucky had chosen to become – could adapt his style to fit the fight, and easily navigated Steve to the end of the scene.

Of course, that gave the Hydra plant dressed as Benvolio an excuse to drop the curtain and somersault onto the darkened stage with a very realistic looking sword.

“Gee,” Sam declared in his normal tone of voice, loud enough to be heard over the mechanical whirring of his wings as they spread. “What gave us away? Was it my hair?”

Bucky drew his own sword, and tossed Steve his shield, because even if Benvolio and Tybalt were Hydra, two men in tights were nothing they couldn’t handle.

Which was when a horde of black-clad stagehands dropped from the scaffolding, holding guns that caught flickers of light from a gap in the curtains.

“Uh, Steve?” Sam called, from somewhere above their heads. “I don’t think these guys are here to move the scenery.”  
  


Act II: In which it looks like curtains for our intrepid heroes

Someone must have forgotten to dispatch the actual stagehands, since the curtain rose just as Steve slung his shield into one Hydra goon, knocking him backwards into two of his friends. The stage lights came on, revealing a force of men in dark clothes with grease paint on their faces, a reluctant Romeo with a vibranium shield, a dueling Mercutio and Benvolio, and Juliet hovering above all of them with a gun and a very tangled mass of blond hair.

“Look mommy!” a high, lisping voice in the auditorium cried. “It’s an angel!”

“Damn straight!” Wilson agreed, and swooped out toward the balcony to shoot the sniper aiming at them.

“'More than prince of cats, I can tell you,'” Bucky said suddenly, timing his speech to the clang of metal as he used his left arm to fend off Benvolio’s sabre. “'He is the courageous captain of compliments.'” The dark-haired assassin slammed the pommel of his sword into Benvolio’s chin, and turned to give Steve an exaggerated bow before facing off with Tybalt. “'He fights as you sing prick-song.'” Bucky skipped the lascivious wink in favor of stabbing the stagehand attempting to sneak up behind him. “'Rests me his minim rest, one, two -” Bucky punctuated each word with a sword thrust, Tybalt’s parrying growing sloppier and more frantic with every breath. “- and the third in your bosom.'” True to his word, Tybalt fell with Mercutio’s sword in his chest. There was scattered applause from the audience, who couldn’t seem to decide if they should run screaming from the theater or film the whole thing on their phones.

Bucky stopped declaiming, after that, and focused on the fighting. Someone sliced through the rope holding the curtain back, and it tumbled back over the stage, throwing their fight into darkness and cutting them off from Sam. They had been tipped off that Hydra was smuggling bodies and information through a traveling stage troupe, and Steve and Bucky had been ready for epees and burly men. They hadn’t prepared for an entire Hydra force with guns.

When Bucky backed into a wooden hedge, Steve didn’t need lights to see the tension sketched in Mercutio’s every limb, didn’t need his enhanced hearing for the grind of his best friend’s teeth and the terror drying his throat. Hydra would aim to capture, if they could, not to kill.

Agents surrounded Steve on the far end of the stage, preventing him from stretching out an arm, reassuring Bucky with a touch that it would be okay. He struggled for words, knowing that if he shouted Bucky’s name it would only distract the other man and throw a battle where the odds were already against them. “Gentle Mercutio!” he tried, instead, snapping his elbow into the gut of a woman trying to shoot him.

Bucky didn’t glance up from his own fight, a sword whirling dangerously in each hand. But he smiled, and replied, “'How oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry! Which their keepers call a lightning before death.'” He beheaded one of his antagonists, a bloody insistence that the Winter Soldier would have no more _keepers_. “'May I call this a lightning? Oh, my love!'” He tumbled under a round of gunfire, rolling safely to his feet a few steps closer to Steve, throwing his whole body back into the fight.

There would be no capture, and no keepers. They would leave the stage, or they would play the tragedy to its end.

 

Act III: Curtain Call

“You couldn’t have picked a more discreet venue?” Coulson demanded, distracting Steve from rolling dead Hydra agents up in the stage curtains that Sam had finally torn down, giving Steve and Bucky time to regroup and trade their sword props for more useful weaponry. “Or maybe waited until _after_ the play?” The new Director waved an irritated hand at the stage doors, indicating the flashing lights of several police cars and emergency vehicles, and a number of audience members wrapped in ugly blankets.

“Oh.” Steve blinked. Took off Romeo’s cap and scratched his head. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“'Pitiful sight,'” Bucky concurred, coming up behind Steve and wrapping a metal arm around his waist. “'Here lies the county slain.'”

“'Death hath no power upon thy beauty,'” Steve returned, murmuring the words into Bucky’s tousled hair, ignoring the huff that meant he had misquoted, or quoted the wrong play.

“'Thou art not conquered,'” Bucky finished for him, and rested his head on Steve’s shoulder while Steve pressed kisses into the crown of Mercutio’s head.

“Next time,” Sam interjected, tossing his wig onto Coulson’s head and landing in a flurry of metal wings and long Venetian dress. “Barnes plays Juliet. He can weep over Romeo’s stupid plan from under that damn hair.”

“And you can wear the tights,” Steve replied, smiling when Clint handed Bucky a bouquet of arrows. His Mercutio took a bow, then straightened and leaned in toward Steve.

Because Bucky had always insisted that the play should end with a kiss.


End file.
